OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Rethinking the Architecture Design for Efficient Generic Event Boundary Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Generic event boundary detection (GEBD), inspired by human visual cognitive behaviors of consistently segmenting videos into meaningful temporal chunks, finds utility in various applications such as video editing and. In this paper, we demonstrate that SOTA GEBD models often prioritize final performance over model complexity, resulting in low inference speed and hindering efficient deployment in real-world scenarios. We contribute to addressing this challenge by experimentally reexamining the architecture of GEBD models and uncovering several surprising findings. Firstly, we reveal that a concise GEBD baseline model already achieves promising performance without any sophisticated design. Secondly, we find that the widely applied image-domain backbones in GEBD models can contain plenty of architecture redundancy, motivating us to gradually ``modernize'' each component to enhance efficiency. Thirdly, we show that the GEBD models using image-domain backbones conducting the spatiotemporal learning in a spatial-then-temporal greedy manner can suffer from a distraction issue, which might be the inefficient villain for GEBD. Using a video-domain backbone to jointly conduct spatiotemporal modeling is an effective solution for this issue. The outcome of our exploration is a family of GEBD models, named EfficientGEBD, significantly outperforms the previous SOTA methods by up to 1.7\% performance gain and 280\% speedup under the same backbone. Our research prompts the community to design modern GEBD methods with the consideration of model complexity, particularly in resource-aware applications. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/Ziwei-Zheng/EfficientGEBD}.
CerberusDet: Unified Multi-Dataset Object Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Conventional object detection models are usually limited by the data on which they were trained and by the category logic they define. With the recent rise of Language-Visual Models, new methods have emerged that are not restricted to these fixed categories. Despite their flexibility, such Open Vocabulary detection models still fall short in accuracy compared to traditional models with fixed classes. At the same time, more accurate data-specific models face challenges when there is a need to extend classes or merge different datasets for training. The latter often cannot be combined due to different logics or conflicting class definitions, making it difficult to improve a model without compromising its performance. In this paper, we introduce CerberusDet, a framework with a multi-headed model designed for handling multiple object detection tasks. Proposed model is built on the YOLO architecture and efficiently shares visual features from both backbone and neck components, while maintaining separate task heads. This approach allows CerberusDet to perform very efficiently while still delivering optimal results. We evaluated the model on the PASCAL VOC dataset and Objects365 dataset to demonstrate its abilities. CerberusDet achieved state-of-the-art results with 36% less inference time. The more tasks are trained together, the more efficient the proposed model becomes compared to running individual models sequentially. The training and inference code, as well as the model, are available as open-source (https://github.com/ai-forever/CerberusDet).
IMAGDressing-v1: Customizable Virtual Dressing
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Latest advances have achieved realistic virtual try-on (VTON) through localized garment inpainting using latent diffusion models, significantly enhancing consumers' online shopping experience. However, existing VTON technologies neglect the need for merchants to showcase garments comprehensively, including flexible control over garments, optional faces, poses, and scenes. To address this issue, we define a virtual dressing (VD) task focused on generating freely editable human images with fixed garments and optional conditions. Meanwhile, we design a comprehensive affinity metric index (CAMI) to evaluate the consistency between generated images and reference garments. Then, we propose IMAGDressing-v1, which incorporates a garment UNet that captures semantic features from CLIP and texture features from VAE. We present a hybrid attention module, including a frozen self-attention and a trainable cross-attention, to integrate garment features from the garment UNet into a frozen denoising UNet, ensuring users can control different scenes through text. IMAGDressing-v1 can be combined with other extension plugins, such as ControlNet and IP-Adapter, to enhance the diversity and controllability of generated images. Furthermore, to address the lack of data, we release the interactive garment pairing (IGPair) dataset, containing over 300,000 pairs of clothing and dressed images, and establish a standard pipeline for data assembly. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our IMAGDressing-v1 achieves state-of-the-art human image synthesis performance under various controlled conditions. The code and model will be available at https://github.com/muzishen/IMAGDressing.
SS-ADA: A Semi-Supervised Active Domain Adaptation Framework for Semantic Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Semantic segmentation plays an important role in intelligent vehicles, providing pixel-level semantic information about the environment. However, the labeling budget is expensive and time-consuming when semantic segmentation model is applied to new driving scenarios. To reduce the costs, semi-supervised semantic segmentation methods have been proposed to leverage large quantities of unlabeled images. Despite this, their performance still falls short of the accuracy required for practical applications, which is typically achieved by supervised learning. A significant shortcoming is that they typically select unlabeled images for annotation randomly, neglecting the assessment of sample value for model training. In this paper, we propose a novel semi-supervised active domain adaptation (SS-ADA) framework for semantic segmentation that employs an image-level acquisition strategy. SS-ADA integrates active learning into semi-supervised semantic segmentation to achieve the accuracy of supervised learning with a limited amount of labeled data from the target domain. Additionally, we design an IoU-based class weighting strategy to alleviate the class imbalance problem using annotations from active learning. We conducted extensive experiments on synthetic-to-real and real-to-real domain adaptation settings. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. SS-ADA can achieve or even surpass the accuracy of its supervised learning counterpart with only 25% of the target labeled data when using a real-time segmentation model. The code for SS-ADA is available at https://github.com/ywher/SS-ADA.
Data Collection and Labeling Techniques for Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2024
Year: 2024

Data collection and labeling are critical bottlenecks in the deployment of machine learning applications. With the increasing complexity and diversity of applications, the need for efficient and scalable data collection and labeling techniques has become paramount. This paper provides a review of the state-of-the-art methods in data collection, data labeling, and the improvement of existing data and models. By integrating perspectives from both the machine learning and data management communities, we aim to provide a holistic view of the current landscape and identify future research directions.
ESQA: Event Sequences Question Answering
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Event sequences (ESs) arise in many practical domains including finance, retail, social networks, and healthcare. In the context of machine learning, event sequences can be seen as a special type of tabular data with annotated timestamps. Despite the importance of ESs modeling and analysis, little effort was made in adapting large language models (LLMs) to the ESs domain. In this paper, we highlight the common difficulties of ESs processing and propose a novel solution capable of solving multiple downstream tasks with little or no finetuning. In particular, we solve the problem of working with long sequences and improve time and numeric features processing. The resulting method, called ESQA, effectively utilizes the power of LLMs and, according to extensive experiments, achieves state-of-the-art results in the ESs domain.
Analyzing Large language models chatbots: An experimental approach using a probability test
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

This study consists of qualitative empirical research, conducted through exploratory tests with two different Large Language Models (LLMs) chatbots: ChatGPT and Gemini. The methodological procedure involved exploratory tests based on prompts designed with a probability question. The "Linda Problem", widely recognized in cognitive psychology, was used as a basis to create the tests, along with the development of a new problem specifically for this experiment, the "Mary Problem". The object of analysis is the dataset with the outputs provided by each chatbot interaction. The purpose of the analysis is to verify whether the chatbots mainly employ logical reasoning that aligns with probability theory or if they are more frequently affected by the stereotypical textual descriptions in the prompts. The findings provide insights about the approach each chatbot employs in handling logic and textual constructions, suggesting that, while the analyzed chatbots perform satisfactorily on a well-known probabilistic problem, they exhibit significantly lower performance on new tests that require direct application of probabilistic logic.
GRAD-SUM: Leveraging Gradient Summarization for Optimal Prompt Engineering
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Prompt engineering for large language models (LLMs) is often a manual time-intensive process that involves generating, evaluating, and refining prompts iteratively to ensure high-quality outputs. While there has been work on automating prompt engineering, the solutions generally are either tuned to specific tasks with given answers or are quite costly. We introduce GRAD-SUM, a scalable and flexible method for automatic prompt engineering that builds on gradient-based optimization techniques. Our approach incorporates user-defined task descriptions and evaluation criteria, and features a novel gradient summarization module to generalize feedback effectively. Our results demonstrate that GRAD-SUM consistently outperforms existing methods across various benchmarks, highlighting its versatility and effectiveness in automatic prompt optimization.
InstructAV: Instruction Fine-tuning Large Language Models for Authorship Verification
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in a wide range of NLP tasks. However, when it comes to authorship verification (AV) tasks, which involve determining whether two given texts share the same authorship, even advanced models like ChatGPT exhibit notable limitations. This paper introduces a novel approach, termed InstructAV, for authorship verification. This approach utilizes LLMs in conjunction with a parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) method to simultaneously improve accuracy and explainability. The distinctiveness of InstructAV lies in its ability to align classification decisions with transparent and understandable explanations, representing a significant progression in the field of authorship verification. Through comprehensive experiments conducted across various datasets, InstructAV demonstrates its state-of-the-art performance on the AV task, offering high classification accuracy coupled with enhanced explanation reliability.
Self-Adaptive Robust Motion Planning for High DoF Robot Manipulator using Deep MPC
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

In contemporary control theory, self-adaptive methodologies are highly esteemed for their inherent flexibility and robustness in managing modeling uncertainties. Particularly, robust adaptive control stands out owing to its potent capability of leveraging robust optimization algorithms to approximate cost functions and relax the stringent constraints often associated with conventional self-adaptive control paradigms. Deep learning methods, characterized by their extensive layered architecture, offer significantly enhanced approximation prowess. Notwithstanding, the implementation of deep learning is replete with challenges, particularly the phenomena of vanishing and exploding gradients encountered during the training process. This paper introduces a self-adaptive control scheme integrating a deep MPC, governed by an innovative weight update law designed to mitigate the vanishing and exploding gradient predicament by employing the gradient sign exclusively. The proffered controller is a self-adaptive dynamic inversion mechanism, integrating an augmented state observer within an auxiliary estimation circuit to enhance the training phase. This approach enables the deep MPC to learn the entire plant model in real-time and the efficacy of the controller is demonstrated through simulations involving a high-DoF robot manipulator, wherein the controller adeptly learns the nonlinear plant dynamics expeditiously and exhibits commendable performance in the motion planning task.
A Survey on Universal Approximation Theorems
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

This paper discusses various theorems on the approximation capabilities of neural networks (NNs), which are known as universal approximation theorems (UATs). The paper gives a systematic overview of UATs starting from the preliminary results on function approximation, such as Taylor's theorem, Fourier's theorem, Weierstrass approximation theorem, Kolmogorov - Arnold representation theorem, etc. Theoretical and numerical aspects of UATs are covered from both arbitrary width and depth.
Temporal Label Hierachical Network for Compound Emotion Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The emotion recognition has attracted more attention in recent decades. Although significant progress has been made in the recognition technology of the seven basic emotions, existing methods are still hard to tackle compound emotion recognition that occurred commonly in practical application. This article introduces our achievements in the 7th Field Emotion Behavior Analysis (ABAW) competition. In the competition, we selected pre trained ResNet18 and Transformer, which have been widely validated, as the basic network framework. Considering the continuity of emotions over time, we propose a time pyramid structure network for frame level emotion prediction. Furthermore. At the same time, in order to address the lack of data in composite emotion recognition, we utilized fine-grained labels from the DFEW database to construct training data for emotion categories in competitions. Taking into account the characteristics of valence arousal of various complex emotions, we constructed a classification framework from coarse to fine in the label space.
A Framework for testing Federated Learning algorithms using an edge-like environment
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Federated Learning (FL) is a machine learning paradigm in which many clients cooperatively train a single centralized model while keeping their data private and decentralized. FL is commonly used in edge computing, which involves placing computer workloads (both hardware and software) as close as possible to the edge, where the data is being created and where actions are occurring, enabling faster response times, greater data privacy, and reduced data transfer costs. However, due to the heterogeneous data distributions/contents of clients, it is non-trivial to accurately evaluate the contributions of local models in global centralized model aggregation. This is an example of a major challenge in FL, commonly known as data imbalance or class imbalance. In general, testing and assessing FL algorithms can be a very difficult and complex task due to the distributed nature of the systems. In this work, a framework is proposed and implemented to assess FL algorithms in a more easy and scalable way. This framework is evaluated over a distributed edge-like environment managed by a container orchestration platform (i.e. Kubernetes).
Retrieval-Enhanced Machine Learning: Synthesis and Opportunities
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

In the field of language modeling, models augmented with retrieval components have emerged as a promising solution to address several challenges faced in the natural language processing (NLP) field, including knowledge grounding, interpretability, and scalability. Despite the primary focus on NLP, we posit that the paradigm of retrieval-enhancement can be extended to a broader spectrum of machine learning (ML) such as computer vision, time series prediction, and computational biology. Therefore, this work introduces a formal framework of this paradigm, Retrieval-Enhanced Machine Learning (REML), by synthesizing the literature in various domains in ML with consistent notations which is missing from the current literature. Also, we found that while a number of studies employ retrieval components to augment their models, there is a lack of integration with foundational Information Retrieval (IR) research. We bridge this gap between the seminal IR research and contemporary REML studies by investigating each component that comprises the REML framework. Ultimately, the goal of this work is to equip researchers across various disciplines with a comprehensive, formally structured framework of retrieval-enhanced models, thereby fostering interdisciplinary future research.
A Survey of Prompt Engineering Methods in Large Language Models for Different NLP Tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance on many different Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Prompt engineering plays a key role in adding more to the already existing abilities of LLMs to achieve significant performance gains on various NLP tasks. Prompt engineering requires composing natural language instructions called prompts to elicit knowledge from LLMs in a structured way. Unlike previous state-of-the-art (SoTA) models, prompt engineering does not require extensive parameter re-training or fine-tuning based on the given NLP task and thus solely operates on the embedded knowledge of LLMs. Additionally, LLM enthusiasts can intelligently extract LLMs' knowledge through a basic natural language conversational exchange or prompt engineering, allowing more and more people even without deep mathematical machine learning background to experiment with LLMs. With prompt engineering gaining popularity in the last two years, researchers have come up with numerous engineering techniques around designing prompts to improve accuracy of information extraction from the LLMs. In this paper, we summarize different prompting techniques and club them together based on different NLP tasks that they have been used for. We further granularly highlight the performance of these prompting strategies on various datasets belonging to that NLP task, talk about the corresponding LLMs used, present a taxonomy diagram and discuss the possible SoTA for specific datasets. In total, we read and present a survey of 44 research papers which talk about 39 different prompting methods on 29 different NLP tasks of which most of them have been published in the last two years.
INTELLECT: Adapting Cyber Threat Detection to Heterogeneous Computing Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

The widespread adoption of cloud computing, edge, and IoT has increased the attack surface for cyber threats. This is due to the large-scale deployment of often unsecured, heterogeneous devices with varying hardware and software configurations. The diversity of these devices attracts a wide array of potential attack methods, making it challenging for individual organizations to have comprehensive knowledge of all possible threats. In this context, powerful anomaly detection models can be developed by combining data from different parties using Federated Learning. FL enables the collaborative development of ML-based IDSs without requiring the parties to disclose sensitive training data, such as network traffic or sensor readings. However, deploying the resulting models can be challenging, as they may require more computational resources than those available on target devices with limited capacity or already allocated for other operations. Training device-specific models is not feasible for an organization because a significant portion of the training data is private to other participants in the FL process. To address these challenges, this paper introduces INTELLECT, a novel solution that integrates feature selection, model pruning, and fine-tuning techniques into a cohesive pipeline for the dynamic adaptation of pre-trained ML models and configurations for IDSs. Through empirical evaluation, we analyze the benefits of INTELLECT's approach in tailoring ML models to the specific resource constraints of an organization's devices and measure variations in traffic classification accuracy resulting from feature selection, pruning, and fine-tuning operations. Additionally, we demonstrate the advantages of incorporating knowledge distillation techniques while fine-tuning, enabling the ML model to consistently adapt to local network patterns while preserving historical knowledge.
Enhancing Temporal Action Localization: Advanced S6 Modeling with Recurrent Mechanism
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Temporal Action Localization (TAL) is a critical task in video analysis, identifying precise start and end times of actions. Existing methods like CNNs, RNNs, GCNs, and Transformers have limitations in capturing long-range dependencies and temporal causality. To address these challenges, we propose a novel TAL architecture leveraging the Selective State Space Model (S6). Our approach integrates the Feature Aggregated Bi-S6 block, Dual Bi-S6 structure, and a recurrent mechanism to enhance temporal and channel-wise dependency modeling without increasing parameter complexity. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art results with mAP scores of 74.2% on THUMOS-14, 42.9% on ActivityNet, 29.6% on FineAction, and 45.8% on HACS. Ablation studies validate our method's effectiveness, showing that the Dual structure in the Stem module and the recurrent mechanism outperform traditional approaches. Our findings demonstrate the potential of S6-based models in TAL tasks, paving the way for future research.
Using LLMs to Automate Threat Intelligence Analysis Workflows in Security Operation Centers
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

SIEM systems are prevalent and play a critical role in a variety of analyst workflows in Security Operation Centers. However, modern SIEMs face a big challenge: they still cannot relieve analysts from the repetitive tasks involved in analyzing CTI (Cyber Threat Intelligence) reports written in natural languages. This project aims to develop an AI agent to replace the labor intensive repetitive tasks involved in analyzing CTI reports. The agent exploits the revolutionary capabilities of LLMs (e.g., GPT-4), but it does not require any human intervention.